The Butterfly House. Marcia Preston

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      My mother sighed and changed tactics. “What in the world is a see-crap-ya moth?”

      I burst into giggles, knowing I’d been tricked but grateful to give up the painful anger. “Not crap-ya! Cecropia. It’s a huge moth that doesn’t have a mouth. It can’t eat so it doesn’t live very long.”

      I linked my thumbs and pressed the fingers of each hand together, like wings. Moonlight animated my hands with shadows. “The caterpillar spins a silk cocoon that’s brown and hairy, like a coconut. But smaller, of course. Lenora counts the days and knows when it’s supposed to hatch.”

      Caught up in the mystery of metamorphosis, I watched my hands act out the drama. “When it’s ready, it gives off some kind of juice that makes a hole in the cocoon, and it crawls out. Its wings are all wet and crinkled up on its back. As they dry out they expand, like a bud opening into a flower.”

      “Lenora told you all this?”

      “Uh-huh. She’s seen it happen.”

      “Yuk,” Mom said, and shuddered. “Sounds disgusting.”

      She began to sing again. “Through thick and through thin, all out or all in, but we’ll muddle through….”

      She paused, waiting for me to join in, but I wasn’t in the mood.

      “To-geth-er,” she finished.

      It was her traveling song. She’d sung it as we drove the miles from Atlanta to Oklahoma City, from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, from there to Shady River. Bored on the long drives, I added my unmusical voice to her firm, resonant one, a kazoo accompanying a violin. Somewhere along the miles, listening to my mother’s voice, I came to believe that everyone in the world has at least one gift. I wondered what mine might be. Maybe I’d be a scientist, like Lenora. Once I’d caught up with my classmates, I turned out to be smart at school. Maybe I’d win the no-bell prize for science that my teacher had mentioned, though I couldn’t figure out what bells had to do with it.

      Mom parked the old Ford Fairlane in the beat-out track beneath the carport. She’d stopped singing now, her mind on other diversions. I recognized that quietness.

      Inside the house, I queried the darkness for Rathbone, the stray cat who’d adopted us part-time. “Kitty, kitty?”

      No answer. Somehow Rathbone managed to come and go from the house as he pleased. Mom probably forgot to close one of the windows.

      She switched on the small light over the kitchen stove and made bologna sandwiches, pouring milk for me, wine for her. I ate my sandwich and left the milk. She left half her sandwich but drank the wine and refilled her glass.

      “Get ready for bed, honey. It’s getting late,” she said.

      In my tiny bedroom, hardly larger than Cincy’s walk-in closet, I donned the oversize T-shirt I used for a nightgown, then went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth over the stained sink. When I came back to say good-night, Mom was sitting on one end of the sofa in the darkened living room, her feet curled beneath her. She offered a one-armed, halfhearted hug.

      The faint disinfectant scent she always carried from her job mingled with the stronger odor of wine. I knew that, in the darkness, the wine bottle sat on the end table next to her.

      “You ought to go to bed now, too,” I said, resting my head against her soft breast. “You’re always tired.”

      “I will, honey. Pretty quick. Sleep tight, now.” She kissed my hair, dismissing me.

      In my dream I was a cecropia larva, trapped inside my cocoon. I chewed and clawed but I couldn’t rend the tough silk fiber I’d spun around myself. I awoke in a panic, the sheet twisted around my legs. Kicking free, I lay in the darkness with my eyes open, waiting for my thudding heart to return to normal.

      A dim light still glowed through the open bedroom door. I gathered up the chenille spread from the foot of my bed and carried it into the living room.

      My mother was asleep on the couch, snoring lightly, the empty wine bottle on the floor beneath her outstretched arm. A shaft of moonlight whitened the hourglass-shaped scar on the inside of her arm, a mark she would never explain. Her breathing didn’t change as I covered her legs and pulled the spread up to her chin.

      My feet were cold when I crawled back in bed, and the knot behind my breastbone had returned. But this time I was angry at myself. For a moment that evening, driving home with my mother and the moonlight on my hands, I’d actually believed we might go shopping tomorrow.

      CHAPTER 3

       Shady River, 1974

      Three, six, nine, the moose drank wine,

      The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. Line broke. Monkey got choked. All went to heaven in a little blue boat.

      I was pretty good at jumping rope, Cincy was better, but Samantha never missed. Never. We had to make a new rule for her, or else it would have been her turn the entire recess. Lean and tall, with long red curls that thrashed about her head in rhythm to her pounding feet, Sam called out her own cadence without even panting. She said that after high school she was going to play ice hockey for a pro team in Canada.

      Sam’s best friend was Patty Johnson. Patty had no coordination, but she had a wide, freckled face that laughed at everything, and besides, she brought the rope. The four of us met on the playground every recess of fifth grade. We’d chant the cadence, then count each rope-skip until the jumper missed—or Samantha reached a hundred. We knew half a dozen rhymes, but the moose one sounded so sophisticated and subversive it was our favorite. Years later, in college, I heard a jazz musician sing the same words and felt a thrill of kinship.

      Occasionally, other girls joined us. When six or more of us stood in the circle, sounding off in unison like an army cadre, our blended voices drew a crowd of watchers. Those times were exciting, like having company. But I loved it best when it was just the four of us, carefree and comfortable together.

      On the rare days I couldn’t go home with Cincy after school, my stomach began a queasy rolling as soon as the dismissal bell rang, as I wondered if my mother would be home yet, and in what condition. Usually she drank wine, which made her mellow and affectionate. If I targeted my requests for the third glass, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. Waiting past the third was successful but risky; the next day she’d deny giving permission. But on the rare occasions she drank whiskey, she got mean. Later on, as a budding high school scientist, I deduced that the different effects of wine and whiskey must be psychosomatic; alcohol was alcohol once it entered the bloodstream. Probably she drank wine when she was feeling gentle and whiskey when she felt mean. But in grade school, all I knew was that the only times Mom struck me were accompanied by the yeasty aroma of bourbon.

      In the seventies, nobody thought a parental palm across the mouth of a sassy child constituted child abuse. Not even the child. Nevertheless, by age ten I’d learned to search the house when she wasn’t home and pour any hard liquor down the drain. I washed away the odor with plenty of water and replaced the empty bottle where I found it, so she’d think she drank it all the night before.

      I left the wine alone. She was rather cheerless when she was sober, and she worried too much.

      Even the wine didn’t help during the СКАЧАТЬ